Like so many of PowerQuest's products, DriveCopy performs a gritty and unglamorous task, but fulfills its purpose so well that it more than earns its purchase price. DriveCopy makes it easy to transfer the entire contents of one hard disk--including hidden files and the contents of the Master Boot Record (MBR)--to another. What's more, it deals smoothly with situations in which the source drive or partition and the target are of different capacities.
To use DriveCopy, you'll need to do the following:
- Let it set itself up on a floppy disk (it comes on a CD-ROM to accommodate some documentation and utilities)
- Boot your system from that floppy
- "See" all the physical drives connected to your computer's IDE and SCSI interfaces
- Coordinate several kinds of copying operations
You can copy a whole disk to another, or copy the contents of only a single partition. If you've just purchased a bigger hard drive and want to make it your boot disk in an IDE system, you have to do a bit of jumper manipulation (you have to make the new drive the child, perform the copy operation, then remove the old drive and make the new drive the parent), but you have to mess with your hardware anyway during a drive upgrade, so the inconvenience is not serious.
Note that when you buy this product, you buy a license to use it on one computer only. You can use DriveCopy to copy data among drives on one machine, but you have to buy another copy of the product if you want to do the same on another computer. For the freedom to use the same instance of DriveCopy on multiple computers, you have to buy the Professional edition of the product. Either way, DriveCopy alleviates the blaring pain of upgrading a hard drive without losing your software and settings. It's a good buy. --
David Wall
Reader Reviews
I found Drive Copy to be the fulfillment of the adage "you get what you pay for." After several attempts to get ALL of my data transferred I began to get error messages. When I consulted the online documentation I found that the error message I received was not listed. It is particularily distressing to have all the documentation online for a product like this because when you have problems you can't get online. You have to take the boot floppy out of the machine and reboot. Once you think you know what to do you must reboot from the floppy. If the problem isn't fixed you start the cycle over again. I ended up buying a copy of Norton Ghost 2000 and it worked perfectly the first time.
